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Editorial: Antipork Progress

Wall Street Journal

September 26, 2006

As Republicans lurch toward November, they're trying to reclaim their birthright as fiscal conservatives. So far they're moved up to a D from an F, with a chance to still grab a gentleman's C.

In the small favors department, the House this month passed an "earmark" reform to bring more transparency to the runaway process of sticking pork into appropriations bills. Give House Majority Leader John Boehner credit for staring down his party's Appropriations Committee barons on this one; that's more than Tom DeLay or Roy Blunt ever did when they ran the majority.

Lawmakers will now have to sign their names to earmark requests, although the loopholes in this requirement are still large. The rule applies only to non-federal earmark recipients, which means that pet projects aimed at, say, the Department of Defense will still be secret. The definition of a "tax earmark" was also deliberately kept narrow, shielding many of those expensive giveaways.

It's also no accident that the new transparency rule won't apply to the 10 spending bills the House has already passed this year. Meanwhile, the Senate has yet to act, and the new House rule expires at the end of this Congress. GOP appropriators figure that they can block its renewal in January, when the election heat is off, assuming their bad spending habits haven't cost Republicans their majority.

In a better sign of progress, President Bush will today sign the "Federal Transparency Act," which will create a searchable public database of some $1 trillion worth of federal grants, contracts and loans. The brainchild of Senators Tom Coburn (R., Oklahoma) and Barack Obama (D., Illinois), the database will help the public identify the lawmakers who sponsor these provisions. The idea is to expose these favors to public scrutiny and force their authors to defend them.

The next test of GOP spending sincerity is whether the Senate will force an up-or-down vote on the "legislative" line-item veto. This would let a President strike out individual spending items from larger legislation, sending them back to Congress for an override vote within 14 legislative days. A simple majority vote would be enough to override, so this item veto isn't as powerful as the one that Republicans gave to Bill Clinton in the 1990s and was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But it would still give the President more leverage to kill the most egregious earmarks.

The House passed the item veto in June, but the Senate has failed to act. By our count, some 65 current Senators have voted for a version of the line-item veto at some point in the past. Eleven Democrats voted to give it to Mr. Clinton, and four more Democrats voted for a version of it while in the House.

Majority Leader Bill Frist should give Senators the opportunity to pass a bill designed to end the secret earmarking that has helped produce some of the corruption scandals in this Congress. Win or lose on the floor, Republicans would at least show they're trying to swear off their own worst spending excesses.